Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane (1 November 1871-5 June 1900) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer from Newark, New Jersey who was affiliated with the American Naturalism literary movement of the late 19th century. He was best known for his books The Red Badge of Courage, The Open Boat, and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.

Biography
Stephen Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1871, the ninth surviving child of Methodist parents. He began writing at the age of four and had published several articles by the age of 16, and, uninterested in university studies (despite his university membership), he left Syracuse University in 1891 to work as a reporter and writer. In 1893, he wrote the Bowery tail Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, considered by critics to be the first work of American Naturalism. In 1895, he won international acclaim for his American Civil War nobel The Red Badge of Courage, which he wrote without having any battle experience.

In 1896, Crane scandalously agreed to appear as a witness at the trial of a prostitute with whom he was acquainted. Later that year, he accepted an offer to travel to Cuba as a war correspondent during the Cuban War of Independence. He boarded the SS Commodore, a gunrunning freighter supplying Cuban rebels out of Jacksonville, Florida, in 1897. The ship ran aground twice, but it later made it out to sea, where it began to slowly sink. Most of the crew and the Cuban fighters were evacuated on three big lifeboats, but Crane waited to the very end and escaped in a ten-foot dinghy with Captain Murphy, the oiler William Higgins, and the cook. One of the lifeboats foundered, and the men in the dinghy watched seven others drown. After thirty hours at sea without food or sleep, the four finally came ashore at Daytona, but Higgins was lifeless when his body came ashore. Crane wrote a newspaper dispatch right away, and, six months later, he wrote The Open Boat, which covered the ordeal on the sea; it was considered one of the finest examples of American naturalism: an irreligious philosophy that viewed the universe as indifferent to the existence and struggles of humans.

He and his lover Cora Taylor went on to cover the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, and he later lived in England with Taylor. He was befriended by writers such as Joseph Conrad and H.G. Wells, and he died of tuberculosis at a Black Forest sanitarium in Badenweiler, German Empire at the age of 28, financially strained and in poor health.